Working with Xubuntu · Mar 19, 09:07 PM by Dylan Doxey
Xubuntu is a Ubuntu distribution with a light weight user interface application which is intended to operate well on older, or low end machines.
Sounds like an idea for my laptop — a six year old Viao PCG-SR33K. This machine enjoys a 600Mhz Celeron processor, 512MB 128MB of ram, and a 30GB hard drive.
Unfortunately the Ubuntu people don’t ship Xubuntu as free disks in the mail.
Which is just as well because I don’t have the patience for that.
I downloaded the ISO and burned it to a CD (using K3b) and promptly popped it into the external CD ROM for my Viao.
The I powered it up — while holding the C key down to notify the Viao bios that I want to boot on the CD. (Maybe that’s not necessary. I should double check.)
Well, this is how I learned about the existence of BusyBox (http://www.busybox.net/).
BusyBox is a light weight collection of unix utilities in a single executable.
This appears to be the means by which the Ubuntu installers go about their business.
However, the average user shouldn’t need to know any of that.
The reason I do, is because of this:
Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands
/bin/sh: can’t access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)
The BusyBox FAQ has a response to this.
http://www.busybox.net/FAQ.html#job_control
It states:
“Job control will be turned off since your shell can not obtain a controlling terminal. This typically happens when you run your shell on /dev/console. The kernel will not provide a controlling terminal on the /dev/console device. Your should run your shell on a normal tty such as tty1 or ttyS0 and everything will work perfectly. If you REALLY want your shell to run on /dev/console, then you can hack your kernel (if you are into that sortof thing) by changing drivers/char/tty_io.c to change the lines where it sets “noctty = 1;” to instead set it to “0”. I recommend you instead run your shell on a real console…”
So, I posted this information on the Ubuntu bug tracking system.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/75135
However, I’m not so patient. Perhaps I can alter the Xubuntu installer myself, and fix the problem.
To start with, I need to extract the content of the ISO file.
Next, I need to address how the shell is run — either /dev/console or tty.
However, looking at the content of the ISO I am hopelessly without a clue as to what needs to be altered.
At this juncture I’ll wrap it up and report back when I have something.
UPDATE: This problem has quietly disappeared with the 7.04 release of Ubuntu.
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